The present invention relates generally to common bus communication systems, and more specifically to bus interfaces of the system.
With a current common bus communication system in which bus interfaces are connected to a common bus, each bus interface is provided FIFO (first-in-first-out) memories corresponding respectively to the user terminals associated with the bus interface. Packets received from the associated user terminals are forwarded from each interface onto the common bus. Upon arrival at each interface, the packets are passed through an address filter and stored respectively into the FIFO memories according to their destinations. On receiving a read request from one of the associated user terminals, the interface accesses the associated FIFO memory to fetch the stored packets therefrom. One shortcoming of the prior art memory configuration is that since the FIFO memories are needed to store as many packets as there are packets to transmit, the storage capacity of the memories would impractically increase if packets of "broadcast" type are handled by the system.